p2pnet - rss feed: Weedshare — without DRM
p2pnet news | P2P:- “At OpenBusiness I read WeedShare is officially dead,” said Marco Raaphorst in Holland, back in June, 2007.
Raaphorst told me he’d, “never liked WeedShare because of the DRM”.
I knew exactly what he meant.
But now Weedshare is on the auction block and co-founder John Beezer (right) says it should be revived.
And this time, it has to be DRM free! - he declares.
‘DRM is a bad idea’
The final nail is being hammered into Weedshare’s coffin. Parent company Shared Media is being dissolved and the remaining assets are going up for sale in an email auction slated to close on March 24.
Beezer says he’s keeping his fingers crossed that everything will end up all in one place and that the new owner will interested in taking the Weedshare model to the next level —-
—- “which we believe is DRM free”.
“I can finally share more information about our plan for a DRM-free version of the service,” says Beezer, going on:
- Lesson learned: even benign DRM is a bad idea. All forms of friction must be eliminated for authorized file sharing to work.
- If you pay a sales commission to media player vendors (ie, WinAmp, Zune, iTunes, RealNetworks, LimeWire) for respecting usage rights contained in metadata, and for facilitating sales, there’s no need for encryption to enforce compliance. And encryption is the heart of the problem with DRM.
- Unlimited free sample plays can be supported by advertising. The Weedshare model depends on free plays, but many major publishers and record labels expect to be paid whenever a song is played. Although we remain sceptical that a business can be built entirely on advertising, we do believe advertising generates enough revenue to cover payments on free sample plays.
- If free plays are supported by advertising, and player vendors build easy payment mechanisms into their players, music can be freely shared, musicians can be paid, and fans would never be prohibited from hearing the music they want when they want. Fans will be willing to step up and pay for music they like because it would make the ads go away (to be replaced by artist photos, lyrics, whatever …), it would express gratitude to the artist, and it could potentially lead to benefits from P2P sharing or organized reselling.
- The Weedshare technology can easily be adapted to make all of this happen.
“Of course,” he says, “there’s a catch to all of this, or we would have done it by now.
Beezer goes on:
“To make this plan viable, either a majority of player vendors or a majority of music labels would need to get on board. It seems almost impossible that the player vendors would voluntarily agree to cooperate, since they are locked in a death match over formats and standards and couldn’t care less about what happens to the music business. If the music labels agreed to a common standard, I think the player vendors would have to go along.
“But allow me to put this delicately —- the music industry seems incapable of pulling its head out and saving itself. Their current strategy of mugging those who try to rescue them seems counter productive.
“That’s where things stand right now. Technology isn’t holding us back. Industry attitudes are.”
Beezer has done a complete about face on DRM, and I asked him for his current thoughts on the subject.
“I think there are a lot of reasons why it’s been a disaster,” he says, going on >>>
Most of these reasons were pretty obvious from the outset. However, I’ve gained an insight on this, having worked in a DRM group at Microsoft and having spent several years in the music business.
In addition to all the other problems, the music industry committed a major strategic error by embracing DRM … specifically, they sacrificed their agenda to the agenda of the software companies. To the music companies, DRM was supposed to be a wonderful cure-all for their digital ills.
But to the software companies (who never expected it to actually work), it was just another front in the battle to control standards. The essence of a classic battle like Microsoft vs Apple is to own and control the data formats. And the game is winner-take-all … compromise and agreement are not part of the strategy.
So, when the labels insisted on DRM, they placed themselves in a passive role while Apple and Microsoft and Real battled to control the formats by which entertainment media is consumed. It’s a high dollar winner-take-all struggle and the music industry has no control over it whatsoever. Except that the battle feeds on the music industry’s demand for DRM. As long as the software companies fight and there is no universal standard for content access, the labels are out of luck, because consumers have no patience for complexity and lack of interoperability. For the last ten years, I would say the music business has driven their car into the ditch and can’t seem to put it in reverse, so there they sat spinning their wheels.
If they stopped insisting on DRM (which they are finally doing) they can decouple from the software game and start controlling their own fate. In fact, they could put their lawyers to good use by pointing them at the big software companies who make media players and encouraging cooperation for the mutual good.
I think there are several instances where the music business has attacked people and companies who could have been their best friends. In retrospect, Napster was the last centralized (and thereby controllable) file-sharing application. The music companies killed it when they should have tried to co-opt it.
So, the bottom line is this: I think it’s good business practise to reason backwards from a happy customer. If things are happening that make customers happy, you should figure out how to facilitate that and then attach some kind of profit engine to it. If music really wants to be free, that’s fine, because t-shirts, posters, concerts and endorsement deals want to be expensive. I think the music business needs to go back to basics and look at things from the perspective of their customers. If customers want to share files, figure out how to make P2P profitable.
Weedshare is a great way to do that.
Holding our nose, we used DRM in order to meet the labels halfway. I have to say that we ran into plenty of intelligent, enlightened people at the labels, but they didn’t have the ability to make necessary changes happen. And ultimately, it was DRM that killed us, since we aligned with the losing side in the software battle.
In terms of a common standard, I’m not too picky. It should simply be any open format for content encoding (MP3, AAC, whatever) and there should be a standard set of metadata tags embedded in the files indicating usage rights.
There should be no encryption. Media players should voluntarily respect clearly specified rights (or risk the wrath of RIAA attorneys!). The ability to purchase music should be included in these rights, the restrictions on those who don’t pay should be as painless as possible (eg, ad supported free plays …) As part of the deal, player vendors who facilitate music sales should get a piece of the action.
At this point, everyone should be happy. P2P file sharing starts to generate revenue and the quality of content available goes up. More people enjoy more music. There should be music for sale on every blog and social networking site, opening up new retail channels to replace the physical stores. A new golden age ensues …
So what, exactly, will Shared Media’s new owner end up with? Using auction@sharedmedia.info to submit their offfers —-
- With a minimum bid of $105,000, they’ll be going after the Microsoft patent non-assertion agreement: “SML will transfer an assignable patent non-assertion agreement protecting the beneficiary from a broad category of Microsoft patents related to compensated superdistribution.”
- Operational data including transaction records, web traffic statistics, and summary analysis. Minimum bid, $15,000
- Weedshare brand - the Weedshare “flower” logo and brand guide, plus associated Internet domains, “Ideal for starting a music blog or community site. Minimum bid, $7,500
- Set of four web servers, database software, and related equipment, “suitible for use by an eCommerce start-up.” Minimum bid, $3,500.
Stay tuned.
[NOTE - p2pnet is running a special reader’s survey. It only takes 20-30 seconds and it’d be a huge help if you’d fill it in. Please click here. Cheers! And thanks … Jon]
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